by Nick Cole
He paused, raising one gnarled and hairy finger, a bit disfigured from a lifetime of left-clicking ancient mouse devices.
“But… it’s the truth. War is sometimes necessary. There is such a thing as the ‘just’ war. In other words… sometimes you gotta smite evil. Sometimes you need to take out a Hitler. Now that’s all gone! We don’t even know how to fight a really big old-school, bomb-the-shipyards-and-factories war. Or, what was once known as ‘total war.’
“So—and this is literally a worst-case scenario—what if that new warp drive we’re currently testing finds some nearby galactic neighbors who aren’t as high-minded as we are about war? Real, actual, no-holds-barred war. The thing we no longer know how to do and were once very good at.”
He slowly spun the expensive ergonomic swivel chair in a complete circle. Once he was facing them again, he continued. “Except, I’ve been finding and hiding every still-in-existence piece of knowledge, and some collectibles, on the subject. I have the last, and most complete, database on the concept of total war in existence. And the only way to get to it… is through my Design Core, which someone is currently hacking.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
“Well, that’s just great!” said Rapp, as they all watched the live feeds on the SurfaceTable, showing the views from various security cameras throughout the Labs. Robots were everywhere. All the main entrances were wide open, and bots and drones of every kind swarmed through them. Mr. Rourke had keyed in a special code that gave them unlimited access to see everything from anywhere.
“How exactly are we supposed to get down to the basement now?” asked Roland.
Ron Rourke stood with his stubby hands on hips, staring at all the various feeds beneath him. Fish, much taller, arms folded across his chest, hand on chin, stood next to him.
“There’s a separate way into the basement no one knows about,” began the game design legend of the past. “Part of my little tunnel system I built into this place. That’s not the hard part. The hard part will be keeping them out of the basement.”
“So then how do we do that?” whined Evan Fratty.
“Guns,” said Rourke.
No one spoke a word. Guns, anything other than a hunting shotgun, had become such a social anathema that even the mention of them was uncomfortable for everyone involved. Public service announcements advised citizens to report anyone who had an unhealthy interest, really any interest at all, in real guns, for the sake of public safety.
“You have real guns?” asked Roland.
“Yes. A lot of them.”
“Inside your… tunnels?” asked Rapp.
“Correct,” stated Rourke, still staring down at the feeds. He waved his hand to bring up the menu on the table. A couple of gestures later, and they were all looking at the layout of the Labs.
“Inside my tunnels, there’s an armory of vintage World War II weapons. Collectibles. It’s a hobby… if you have tons of money. I’ve been collecting them for a long time.”
“And the ammo?” asked Rapp.
“That too. We can take the tunnels to the central hall. Underneath the security station is a manhole that leads down to the Design Core. The manhole was installed for just this type of scenario. Right now, no matter what, those robots will have to do a lot of cutting, digging, and even using construction-grade explosives, which I have no doubt they are quite capable of doing, to get through the basement to the Design Core vault. Until then, the Design Core is going to be locked out to external access. But, the manhole in the shack leads right down into the heart of the complex.
“Unfortunately, one of the security features California made me put in was that the manhole must remain open once it’s been opened, if the standard exits are sealed, which they are. So, in other words, the security station will be totally vulnerable. No low-yield nuke-resistant PlateGlass from the Einsteins at M.I.T. Meaning, you’ll need to defend the shack while I go down and destroy the Design Core.”
“Destroy it?” shrieked Evan Fratty. “I’m sorry, sir, but do you know how much intellectual property is contained on that monster? We’ll be sued into obscurity. We’re talking trillions in losses. It’ll be the end of the company.”
No one said anything.
Ron Rourke, legendary pioneer of the modern video gaming of yesterday and old man of today, whispered, “I know that, son.”
“Then why?” crooned Evan Fratty. “Why not just let them have it? So what? Insurance will cover us, we won’t get killed, and the company will survive. We’ll make new games. If we do this… if we do this tonight… no one will ever want to design anything with us ever again. And after the lawsuits, we’ll have nothing left. Nothing, sir!” Evan Fratty was shaking with indignant rage. The self-righteous kind.
“Son, this might be about more than just games and the bottom line. Like I explained, there’s my collection. Total war. That’s really dangerous stuff. You don’t think some rogue nation, or the next Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot might be itching to get his filthy hands on that?”
“I don’t care, sir,” bleated Evan Fratty. “We’ll be ruined.”
“As opposed to the world being destroyed, Evan?” shrieked Deirdre.
Rourke sighed.
“All right. Full disclosure, kids. I’ve known for a long time that someone’s been snooping around the internet for this thing. I even hired a small company to look into it. Someone totally off-grid. I couldn’t take a chance with all the legit internet security giants because of the nature of the… well, the subject. I couldn’t even hide it here. So I hid it inside the Make on a cloud inside one of the games. Homeland’s privacy laws protect it. They’d need a court order just to unlock the cloud. Or, someone would need to hack the cloud, in-game, to get access to the actual file. But they need my keys inside the Design Core to unlock the file. The on-site admin codes here at WonderSoft will give them those keys. My guess is someone’s doing just that. I messed up. I realize that now. But it was all… it was all twisty little passages.” He stared around at everyone, expecting them to understand now that he’d used the enigmatic phrase from some un-remembered lore of entertainment past. Instead, he merely came off as bewildered. As an old man. Out of place, and out of time.
“I should’ve just wiped everything once I realized someone knew I had it. It’s dangerous, kids. Knowledge is one of the most dangerous things known to man. The guy who gave the Soviets, y’know, the Russians back in the day, the bomb, the nuclear bomb, the big one, he said that the truth was the most powerful weapon in the world. And that it was often protected by a bodyguard of lies. Well, this is the truth about how to destroy the world. So that makes it like… really, really dangerous. Whoever it is that’s trying to get this, they’re not interested in Volleyball Sluts or Call of Duty: Battlefield. Or even Grand Theft Auto: The Hooker Killer 2. That’s child’s play for adults. Kid stuff. No. They want my file. They want to know how to do strategic bombing… to bring an enemy to its knees. When and why to use a tactical nuclear weapon. How to gas an entire city so you can still access its production capabilities once you clean up the corpses. Y’know, the awful stuff that gets results. And this…” He waved his hands at the robot-filled security feed. “This is their bid for all of it.”
For a good three minutes, no one moved. They watched the robots and thought about dead cities and irradiated farmlands. About starvation and horror. About the power grid being knocked out, not just for a few hours, or a day, but for years to come. About crops in Central Park as buildings decayed and fell over. About out-of-control wildfires thousands of miles long. Basically, they saw the end of everything as anyone knew it.
“So,” began Rapp. “We’ve got to go in and knock out this computer thing, and that’ll save civilization. Is that what you’re sayin’, Mister Video Game?”
“Yeah,” mumbled Rourke. “It sure looks that way.”
“Groovy,” said Rapp.
Rapp gave him a look.
“Well,” announced Rapp to the collective audience. “I for one am up for saving the world. Who’s with me?”
Without missing a beat, Evan Fratty declared that he was not up for anything that endangered his life or the assets of the company, even if Mr. Rourke, the owner of said company, was clearly, no offense intended sir, out of his demented mind.
“None taken,” replied Rourke. “So we’ll put you down as a ‘no’ for saving the world, Evan. Ya good?”
Evan felt that was for the best at this time.
The others, every last one of them, were down for saving the world.
***
Twenty minutes later, they were threading the subtly blue-lit industrial soft gray concrete-lined catacombs and gleaming yellow-painted ladders through the guts of the Labs. Eventually they arrived at a vault door. An actual Swiss bank-style, gleaming vault door. O’Rourke did a hand scan, a biometrics scan, a pupil scan, entered a password, and spoke a code phrase, “All your base are belong to us,” before being allowed to turn the polished handle that spun effortlessly as the manual hydraulic door inched its way open. Inside were racks upon racks of M1 Garands and Carbines, Colt 1911 .45 caliber pistols, Thompson machine guns, Browning heavy machine guns, Mosin–Nagant bolt-action rifles, a couple of PPD-40s, a bazooka, an actual working flamethrower, three MG 34s, ten MP 40s, and a Luger pistol emblazoned with a swastika and a skull on the grip.
“Oh, Mama,” rumbled Rapp.
There were other random individual rifles, pistols, and various weapons of every kingdom that didn’t exist anymore from back when the world went all out and made a really good go of attempting to annihilate itself. There was even an authentic samurai sword.
Everyone was pretty sure that Evan Fratty, who’d chosen to remain locked inside the suite, would have disapproved of everything in the vault. Even the live pineapple-shaped hand grenade in a glass display case.
Chapter Forty-Nine
“You don’t know if you actually trust me,” replied Mara to JasonDare’s question as to how he could trust her. How all this wasn’t some Romulan clan trap. “But we’re here, we’re stuck, and this player, I mean this alien, is obviously up to no good. That’s classic Trek.”
And, thought Jason, maybe teaming up with her could be a way out of this publicity fiasco.
“What I propose,” began Mara, “is for us to establish a tractor beam. Using the tractor link, you can hot-start our reactor core with the cascade that’s destroying your reactor. That should stabilize your power supply and then we’ll both have weapons and power. Then we can do something about the Drex.”
The science officer got a heads-up in his iLens. He moved to the captain’s chair and leaned in.
“Sir,” he whispered, “we won’t have any weapons online once we restart. We’ll need time to get those systems back online. They could destroy us at that point.”
Jason looked away. As though he were thinking of some new plan that would get them all out of this. With a retinal flick, he brought up Twitter on his social media page in the iLens. Quickly, he clicked through to the Trending page. Hashtag CaptainMara was in the top five, and it didn’t take too many tweets to get the gist of how the world felt about her.
“Go girl, go. U my hero!” read one.
“CaptainMara is kicking some booty!” read another.
“This gives me hope for my son who has autism. Need more real stars like this girl today.”
Jason nodded.
He knew which way the wind was blowing. Time to play your cards accordingly, he told himself.
“All right, we’ll assist you.” He paused. Yeah, he told himself, knowing it was all for effect. Knowing it was all just a game. If he played this next line just right, if he sold it to the entire world, it would be captured and repeated on every entertainment news show for the next week.
I’m just an actor, he reminded himself. Selling it is what I actually do best.
And then he said it.
“Intrepid is with you… CaptainMara.”
And the internet went nuts.
***
They broke out into a marble-lined hall just off the main corridor that led to the central hub and the guard shack. Words were etched into the wall. Classic phrases from text-based hits of some lost golden age of gaming no one remembered anymore.
“Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.”
“You have died of dysentery.”
“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”
Everyone carried two weapons and lots of ammo. Rourke had instructed them in the rudimentary use of firearms of the past century, but the look he gave each didn’t exactly indicate much confidence in their abilities. It was Rapp who excelled. It was Rapp who carried the MG 34 German light machine gun with belts and belts of ammo, along with the almost-out-of-gas chainsaw he’d attached to his belt and the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun on his back. He looked… comically over-prepared. Rourke carried even more belts for the fearsome MG 34.
In the main hall, they encountered zombie-bots. On reflection, as Ron Rourke aimed for zombie heads with his 1911, it was a good first encounter. A “first-level” encounter, he told himself, and chuckled as he blazed away with the small hand cannon. The zombie-bots were made to be killed, and hence, they made good target practice. Deirdre proved to be an exceptionally good shot. Cool under fire for the most part, until a hot shell danced across her perfect arm and she almost blew Roland’s head off as she first reacted by pulling the pistol away from the oncoming zombie-bot horde and then, wincing hard at the quick sear from the hot shell, squeezed off another shot at Roland’s head.
“Sorry!” she squeaked after barely missing the coder, her normally velvety voice now high and worried.
A suddenly pale Roland nodded slightly and raised his M1 Carbine, firing three shots to kill one demolition-bot that had mixed in with the zombies.
As the last drone fell to the floor, it crawled toward Rapp and muttered, in its sound-effect-laden death groan, “Not want.”
And then it seemed to “die.” Like a living thing and not just a machine fritzing out. Or at least, that’s what it felt like to Rapp as he stepped away and fed a new belt into the German death machine he was carrying.
They made it to the security station, the shack, while encountering only a few more lumbering bots of various design. All seemed caught unaware, as though they had been engaged in some other project, task, or even thought, and they went down in hails of sudden bright gunfire.
“Where’d they all go?” asked Deirdre.
“My guess,” replied Rourke, wiping sweat from his brow, “is that the main body is down in the basement complex attempting to blow their way into the Design Core. It’ll—”
As if on cue, there was a brief and sudden rumble from below.
Everyone waited to see if the polished-steel wedding cake of a lunatic that was the fantastic Labs would come crashing down all around and upon them. When it didn’t, it was Rourke who moved first, stepping on some of the broken and dusty aquamarine blue glass from the galaxy mural that had once awed the upward-looking.
“There’s several feet of reinforced concrete down there and a vault door that makes my armory look like a cardboard box. It’ll take them forever to get through.”
He hustled toward the security station and lowered the rest of the defensive PlateGlass walls with an app on his smartphone.
“Since I’ve already admitted to several crimes today, I’ll just go ahead and confess that I paid state inspectors to erase the manhole cover from the Labs’ building plans. They just wanted it there so that some guard didn’t get trapped for days down in the dark. That seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.
”
“Don’t they always,” muttered Rapp, falling easily into the role of action hero with a quip for every aspect of Armageddon.
They followed Rourke into the security station. Without the dense PlateGlass walls, it was merely a tall circular desk in the center of an immense room at the heart of a fantastic sculpture.
Rourke did some more work on his smartphone, and a moment later a narrow manhole cover released from near-invisible seams in the floor and opened of its own slow accord. Cold air and gas escaped into the atmosphere of the shack.
“There’s got to be some way to get the protective glass walls up now,” stated Peabody. “I’ve heard they’re almost bomb-proof.”
